Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
“Take your intergalactic asses back home!,” protagonist William Radford screams gleefully at his screen while watching ‘War of the Worlds’ unfold real time. If the term ‘keyboard warrior’ needed an exaggerated explainer, this would be it.
After twenty minutes, I just couldn’t believe the creators of the 2025 film chose the ‘screen life’ (think ‘Searching’, ‘Missing’ or ‘Logout’) format to retell H.G Wells classic apocalyptic science-fiction story. The audacity to limit such a larger than life epic tale to just computer screens! What the hell? Clearly a clever wait to cut down the budget by director Rich Lee and team, but ‘we not so dumb’ yo!
Ice Cube plays protagonist William Radford, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officer whose primary job is surveillance. He can monitor nearly anyone on the planet, hack into any device, and essentially has access to the kind of high-tech systems villains chase in action movies.
But this is ‘War of the Worlds’, so we get super-villains – giant violent cyborg Aliens wrecking havoc on earth. And it is up to William Radford to figure out a way to stop them, with some help from brat son David (Henry Hunter Hall) and brilliant daughter Faith (Iman Benson). Yeah, convenient how the three people that can save the world are in the exact same family.
The special effects are so underwhelming, it often looks like William Radford is sitting in front of a green screen rather than a real office (and honestly, that might be true). For a post-apocalyptic film, he spends nearly the entire runtime glued to a chair, managing crises through Zoom, video calls, and Teams. ‘War of the Worlds’ ultimately feels like a film about a guy playing a post-apocalyptic video game (watch ‘Fallout’ instead).
“It’s not 0 percent rotten tomatoes bad, but it’s pretty bad. At least they do justice to the alien life creatures, their designs are sort of faithful to what H.G Wells had imagined,” I told a friend.
“You are just struggling to find points to defend the movie aren’t you?” friend laughed on the phone.
“Okay, fine, I take my words back, maybe it does deserve the rating, I didn’t even finish it in one sitting and left the last half hour to watch later in the evening.”
‘War of the Worlds’ Gets 0% Rotten Tomatoes Rating Yeah, I’m not defending the film, I was supremely annoyed to realize the makers were going to stick to the screen-life format until the end. As if there’s a rule that if you tell your film through screens, you can’t break the pattern? Once the alien invasion begins, they should’ve switched to on-ground action, and maybe it wouldn’t have felt so boring.
Anyway, once I realized the makers were maybe just not that serious, with Ice Cube’s character acting like he’s playing a video game, I was able to laugh a little through the second half of ‘War of the Worlds’. The character interactions are dumb, and they definitely needed someone with better acting skills to play protagonist William Radford in order to sell the “world-ending” level tension. It never feels real or convincing.
If budget was the issue, the producers should’ve pitched War of the Worlds to the multiple brands that appear throughout the runtime, despite not being official sponsors. At one point, a self-driving Tesla comes to the rescue of a major character, and you can’t help but wonder if it’s a sponsored plug. Spoiler: it’s not.
Let’s just say this version of ‘War of the Worlds’ wouldn’t make H.G. Wells proud. He might’ve cackled, or like they say – ‘rolled’ in his grave… if he hadn’t been cremated.
Rating: 3 on 10. ‘War of the Worlds’ on Prime Video.
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